Film Review: ‘He Named Me Malala’
★★★☆☆ Davis Guggenheim opens his latest documentary, He Named Me Malala (2015), with its most essential element – the voice of Malala Yousafzai. Instantly...
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.
★★★★☆ With Luca Guadagnino’s terrific Challengers, the acclaimed director of Call Me By Your Name brings us the sub-genre we never knew we needed: the erotic tennis thriller.
★★☆☆☆ Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s “Abigail” mashes up crime caper and monster movie, but fails to deliver fear or humor. Spoilery trailers and unoriginal characters overshadow promising elements, resulting in a dull, lifeless experience lacking creativity and wit.
★★☆☆☆ Maïwenn’s French period drama Jeanne du Barry is the perfect opening salvo for the 76th Cannes Film Festival. It is as glitzy and gaudy as the festival itself, with its vacuous politics drowned out by the thunderous sound of it slapping its own back.
★★★☆☆ Davis Guggenheim opens his latest documentary, He Named Me Malala (2015), with its most essential element – the voice of Malala Yousafzai. Instantly...
★★★★☆ In the opening moments of Karen Guthrie’s understated and extremely moving The Closer We Get (2015) her car glides along darkened roads at...
★★☆☆☆ A meticulously coiffed Bradley Cooper cruises around town on a superbike. Haute cuisine relies just as heavily on presentation as actual substance and...
★★★★☆ John Crowley’s Brooklyn (2015) is based on a novel of the same name by Colm Tóibín, a man considered by many to be...
★★★★☆ Back on the big screen across the UK in conjunction with the BFI’s ‘Love’ season is one of the most well-known cinematic contemplations...
★★☆☆☆ It’s a problem that has plagued more than one studio in the past 24 years: how to continue the Terminator franchise after James...
★★★★☆ There are two types of western: those that build up the myth of the Old West – Rio Bravo (1959), The Searchers (1956),...
★★★★☆ There’s a moment near the end of David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn (2014) where the titular character sums up the kind of angry person...